Strigoi: Chapter 1

What it’s like to be the wife of a count. Boring, stately, expectations of you all day long, ramifications of his decisions as to what to do about the region, two countries warring for control of yours while yours tries to claim its autonomy. Oh, and we had barely enough of an army to pose a threat and only to one side of it, and that was the side that was semi-peaceful since they had good political relations with us via one relative- me.

What it’s like to be married to the man. Exciting, passionate, not pretentious, broken, traumatized since having been sent off to fight for a country to which he had no allegiance other than that his parents had to send him in order to maintain peace. To add to that, well, we had two children, so you figure out how good he was in bed. It wasn’t a loveless marriage of convenience. I actually turned him down at first, arguing that I’d rather marry someone who didn’t have to send our hypothetical children off to war, and as I think about it now I realize it was very similar to Hunger Games. Being able to write of it now. That’s what comes from being an immortal.

What it’s like to be married to a vampire. Still the passionate man who was misunderstood, labeled for his wartime bloodlust which, to hear it as he described it, was a mode he went into in which he simply fought and wasn’t fully sentient. Then he comes home one day from having been out with his troop with an actual bloodlust. This is after he’d been poring over books about vampires and the supernatural, books that could only be found in the very back of the libraries in monasteries, since they had to address the unholy as well. In Greek, the thing that made him was called a vrikolakas. Where we lived, we called it strigoi. It was some combination of blood-drinker and soul-sucking thing. Even interpersonally, later when I met him, it, not sure what to call it really, he seemed to suck the life out of all he interacted with without having to do anything literal or, from what I could sense, astral draining at all. He would make them so angry or sad that they would feel low on energy, truly drained of it. By the time he’d gotten out of that cave in which my husband found him, he looked a truly changed man. He was younger, oddly healthier, and livelier than my husband had become, himself looking drained and drawn, not the man or the count I remembered. He could no longer keep up with the children during the day, though we’d made him a sort of amulet that supposedly warded him. Oh, this was after he’d gained us those victories against our enemies on all sides that were literally feats of immortality according to his now adoring public that had then scorned and labeled him.

Of course, they were thirsty. They’d gained all these victories even themselves, though not as great as their master’s, but still impressive. They were night-dwelling, blood-feeding things that were no longer the people they’d been in life. The daylight shunned them, as did the mortal world, a world to which they’d previously belonged. There was some resentment there, as much as they enjoyed their newfound powers that made them soar, at least at night, high into the heavens on no actual wings. To watch the look on his face as he recounted how easily they’d given in to the thirst and began to turn on their own townspeople they used to regard as friends or at least too human to harm, it was as though they were truly monsters that pretended to have the same habits and personalities as the people they’d been in life. Hard to talk of people now dead, but still existing within their own bodies. Animated corpses, after a fashion. And they weren’t even Frankenstein monsters, but I’ll get to that later.

The ones he made in order to fully fight against armies that greatly outnumbered them indeed descended fully into night-typehood. They lost their desire for food and ability to procreate. Blood was their sustenance, and the only time they displayed any mood close to what one would call horny was when they thirsted and drank. It was as though blood had become their food and their sexual activity. They had no care as to others, losing their capacity to distinguish lifetime friends from beverages. I didn’t admire any one of them. As it was, I hadn’t admired them much in life. They did their duties to their countries as just those and nothing more. The honor they got from doing so was nothing more than being commended and accredited and, with time, promoted to such heights as would almost befit a king. There was something different in the man that approached me, rather humbly but still with a certain daring to him, to be his new bride. He didn’t have the usual disrespect and disregard for women that the others had. He didn’t come up to me with the attitude of one who expected to be chosen as a husband over the others simply because he was who he was, that he was at such a station, though still lowlier than mine. Everyone expected me to choose the ones who were of a higher rung than him, those relatives that I so resented because they’d middle-named me Jusztina, meaning one who is just. They’d named me that so I’d be the docile and well-mannered girl they expected out of a princess. As I said, they also expected me to choose a prince, not a count. But I’d grown tired of the pretension and self-importance that always accompanied the presence of every other suitor, and even as I turned towards him I expected him to be the same. But no. I found a refreshingly, yes confident and a bit cocky but with reason to be, boyish-acting man despite his years. He didn’t pretend to be smarter than he was, though he was brilliant at times, relaying tales to me he’d read in books that no one would expect him to have read. Nobles didn’t in fact bother with reading books unless they were bookish types and then everyone would joke about how they should have been clerics or scribes. My own brother even wanted to at one point, being the only other purer person my husband later made in order to vanquish enemies no one would have expected us to even fight against in the first place. Our family didn’t exactly pump out purer people. I don’t mean noble of blood, but the inner quality of purity, the strength that was rather Arthurian in nature that my husband himself indeed had, otherwise he wouldn’t have done so well even one a three-day test run. My brother and I, and our children, had that too. He never made them, but he did manage to send them off to a monastery to train as monks. They later became ascetic fighters that would never wield a weapon against an opponent. So good were their fighting moves that they didn’t need to. My husband would joke that they’d been made anyhow with moves like those. They fought like little whirlwinds of moves that combined strength and agility with just enough flexibility to look a bit like acrobats. We would check in on them from time to time, usually right after their dinners.

However, as I descended more into the bloodlust, still fighting its full effects enough not to drink, I found I could no longer visit them.

~

I later woke up one day feeling very different, and more and less limited in certain ways. If I willed it, I could make anyone empathize with me by simply making eye contact with them, which disturbed me the more I was able to. I was then a child again for some reason. I didn’t yet know the deal my erstwhile husband had made with the one who’d made him about me. I didn’t like it once I did find out lives later that I was looped, as he called it. It meant that I was stuck returning as his bride in every life I would live, whether I’d choose it or no. I only found out at the very first from the whispers of vampires I was spying on at the time, pretend to be their secretary and later getting found out for being part of a vampire militia that countered the activities of the night-typed as opposed to those who abstained and resisted the lifestyle that night-types had come to enjoy. Nevermind that they’d gone from looting off of blood-drained corpses to get the money they later spent so lavishly on masquerade balls and the sort. It sickened me and my brother who hadn’t changed. He seemed to me more of an uncle figure by the time I returned, though not of my own will. The fact was that I’d thought I’d die and simply go to Heaven on that stone slab that Vlad drained me on. Yes, it was after I prompted him to do so to save our children and our people, but I hadn’t expected to return after that. It was vexing to say the least, but there I was this child that had empathic powers that had been awakened in her by the venoming that she couldn’t even remember. I’ve Awakened lives later. I now remember myself as though all my lives bled into one. Huh, bled.

I was then to pose as one of my children, namely my son of all people. I didn’t understand why at first, until they told me that in order to control my empathic powers they thought I should learn control of my body first. Some discipline in something would do me good. So I learned all that my son knew of ascetic fighting. I became the best ascetic fighting monk I knew how to be, and was still a perfectionist about it in my own head no-matter how much praise I received. I had to pose as a boy after all just to get the same respect since a girl would not even have been considered as anything more than a nun at the time.

By then, my erstwhile husband had gotten rid of all the others he’d made. He’d only kept around the pure ones that resisted the venom’s effects within them. I suppose that included me, though as I said I didn’t remember enough at the time to even know I’d been made a vampire. I ate food, didn’t crave blood, and garlic didn’t harm me, nor did crosses. In fact, I rather enjoyed garlic on the majority of my food. If I really wanted, since my empathic powers were, in fact, water powers, I could slap someone with at least astral if not physical water. Any fluids would do after a time. I felt a bit like Elsa from the movie Frozen with them, especially one time when I accidentally made my sister slip on some water I happened to send in her direction and hid the back of her head on the stone floor. That disturbed me. I remember that I went three straight days without even touching fluids to drink after that. I thought I needed food more than water to survive. What did I know of dying of dehydration? But when they found me on the floor, barely able to move because I’d practically conked out enough to collapse, I knew better.

~

I grew into a lovely young woman, but with no husband and no interest in even seeing any suitors, not that my then adoptive father or uncle were encouraging me to. In fact, whenever the topic would come up, my father would oddly wince at the thought. I didn’t know who he’d been enough to understand why. He looked so different from the way he had then that it didn’t jog my memory.

I didn’t know at the time that I’d also been lycaned. When I went into the main headquarters behind all the goings-on of the night-type vampires as the spy secretary, that was dormant within me. Well, it came out when they left me chained in the lab in which I was working with someone who seemed more like my real dad, my spirit dad if that makes any sense. We were working on something for someone who seemed to be the main head night-type, the master if you will. I think he reveled in that, because from the few times I saw him he walked with a kind of swagger particularly when anyone addressed him in a servile manner. I somehow brought myself back; I think my system did it for me. I any case, once I had, I looked around for other lycans, remembering that they’d been there, mostly chained within the dungeons, waiting to be picked up by some woman who’d bought them for her own purposes. They were all darker-furred than me as I was white-furred and they were all either black-furred or brown-furred. There was one male cub that was left behind since his mom had died protecting him from the blows of the vampires. He needed food and shelter, so when a man appeared and looked at me kindly and reassured me that he was there to help with the lycans too, I handed the cub off to him. I later found out that he had taken him to a cave that he was staying in for some reason. At least he was safe and had a friend and food. I’d honored his mom and his dad in that. I later saw the dad barely still chained to one of the blocks of the building that some of our troop was burning down to burn any remaining night-types or at least just their headquarters. He looked a lot like the lycan version of someone I felt like I knew.

After that, I was conscious on and off since the death and coming back took a lot out of me, and I ended up in my own dungeon, but with different purpose. I was known to these men as The Punisher since I punished them into purifying out of having the inner toxicity of having been tortured by this woman who turned out to be the same woman who’d been purchasing the lycans from the headquarters. My favorite of them was the one who came out of it all first, and who I was later lovers with up until he was taken back into the woman’s dungeons. When he wasn’t able to meet me one time, I knew something was wrong. I left the other men a note as to what to do should I not return and went to make sure of where he was. What I found out as I went further disturbed me the more I heard about what had happened to him. I was only reassured by the fact that the person that had taken him seemed to have a penchant for virgin females rather than for men. That comforted me until I got there. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but to look at it once one was inside was an entirely different matter. There were curtains everywhere, with rich colors mostly of autumn. When I finally got to him, I was escorted by two bodyguards that looked like they’d been in far too many fights to have much humanity left in them.

The woman came up right behind him, silent and graceful like a cat, putting on her robe as she did so. She looked at me inquiringly with the look of a lover who was wondering why I, another woman, was looking at him like I knew him and like I was particularly happy to see him. That I knew of, he’d never had a girlfriend while we were lovers. He didn’t even act like he knew why she was acting so possessive. She simply leaned on his shoulder with a slink of her opposite hip and waited to hear what I had to say. I don’t think it would have mattered what I had to say because later on we were both in one of her dungeons where I could finally tell him how I’d missed him and I’d been worried about him. I was sad that he was back in this state and wished I could do something. I tried bribing anyone of her guards, and even her, that I could talk to, but to no avail. They thought it comical that I even tried, tossing the coins up in the air and laughing even more once they landed on the floor. Some even joked that it looked like it was heads. I didn’t know then what they meant.

I later came to know the first time they chopped someone’s head off, someone I even recognized as a man I’d declined to torture since he seemed too broken and simply off to help. When they watched his head roll around and called it, I knew what they’d meant before.

I later became her favorite, seeing as I was, at least in that life, a virgin female myself. She cut had the border of my stomach open in order to make my blood flow into a bathtub in which she waited. If one has seen Hostel 2, one knows what I’m referring to. In Interview with the Vampire, the Theatre des Vampires scene would also remind me of when I’d been raped and drunk from almost to the point of dying in front of an audience that simply couldn’t tell soon enough to try to stop it from happening. They thought somehow that I was a consenting actor rather than a victim. That was her theater for us on her stage.

I was only found what turned out to be years later in a tower in which she kept me as her only remaining victim, her favorite to torture for having helped most of the others escape along with the help of my friend. My friend had found other people to help him break me out of there. I was so grateful when he did.

After the trials in which I’d testified against her and she was finally incarcerated in one of her castles, I became a spy for a group of people who hired me on a permanent basis. They seemed to know me more than I knew them, but they seemed kind and I sensed no threat, so I joined them. It helped that they were allied with my friend.

I was later at a masquerade ball, posing as a vampire which wasn’t hard to do since it turned out I’d been made one in a recent enough past life. I was to dance with one night-type in particular: their master. He was the tallest, the most gaunt, had the longest widow’s peak, and held himself with a poise that was ethereal in its grace. Some joked that it was a bit feminine. I’d met men with that amount of grace and never found them feminine so I didn’t think it was wrong or overly girly at all for a man to hold himself in such a way. What was wrong was what I was there to stop, the night-type vampires’ way of life. I’d been told by the group I’d joined that they’d done far worse things than just drink blood and loot corpses. There was more than one generation of them. They’d started with the second generation, which didn’t succeed. They died so easily that lava killed them. The next generation, called the fourths since the males were the fourths and the females were the thirds, was considered very dangerous and very volatile indeed. They were almost like bears or rabid dogs in the way in which they approached drinking. It was more like feeding for them, and they would leave nasty bite marks that looked like the claw marks of a lycan. Sixths were those who resisted, and so much so that they gained the right to walk in the sunlight. Apparently I was one.

As I danced with their master, he tried mind tricks on me that didn’t work at the time, but that gave me a big headache.

I later heard he later escaped because it was either catch him or catch the others and somehow numbers rather than rank were more important.